Gabriel Summits His First Mountain

Yesterday, Tony visited us with the Coopers. After a delicioso lunch at Moe's, we traveled to Stone Mountain Park. We'd never visited the plantation there before, and the Coopers wanted to see it, so we went there first. It was really interesting. The house was beautiful, but of course we know that it was a plantation house and we can't get too excited about it. Still, it would be nice to have a house like that - except with a real bathroom. There was a smokehouse that smelled really nice, even though it looked like something out of a horror movie.

It was going to get dark soon, so we went to the mountain hiking trail. On the way up the mountain, Tony found a geocache - it was the first for him, the Coopers, and Gabriel! Gabriel had slept in the car for the last one we did, so this was officially his first. We left a Michigan basketball schedule and a dollar and took two things. One was a thing that looked like a credit card, but there were plane parts that could be punched out and put together to make a 3-D plane. The other was practically the find of the century. It was a stamp of chikara, the symbol that Patty has tattooed over her belly button. It means strength of an inner kind, and the more pregnant she got, the more strength she needed, and the bigger that tattoo got. But we digress...

As we got to our second geocache, the sun was setting over the city of Atlanta in the distance, and a fellow hiker got this great photo of all of us:

Just beyond this point, we found a carving in the mountain left by someone from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Go Blue!

Finally, we made it to the top of the mountain. It was quite dark and extremely windy. In fact, the sky train had been closed all day due to high winds. After a quick couple of pictures, we hightailed it back down the mountain. Gabriel was such an adventurer. He didn't complain at all, even though it was quite cold and windy, and his little hands were frozen. In fact, he had lots of smiles for all of us and even relaxed so much that he fell asleep in the baby carrier on the way back down the mountain.

We went to dinner at Ray's-Cedars and had some fantastic Mediterranean food and pizza before the gang went back to 'Bama.

Here are some more links to things we mentioned here:

Stone Mountain Park

Gabe's first cache

Our second cache of the day